Dr.
Josef Mengele was known as "der Weiss angel," or the white angel,
at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland during World War II. His
white lab coat caught the fleeting attention of dying "patients"
there, as he prepared and executed his grotesque genetic experiments on
them. One wonders what historians of the future will call the doctors
at the Veterans Administration who are poised to perform their own genetic
experiments on a captive population.

The
VA recently launched a massive medical data collection effort called the
"Million Veteran Program," run by Doctors Timothy O'Leary and
Joel Kuppersmith at the Veterans Health Administration, Office
of Research and Development.

The
good doctors are gathering genetic information from one million former
U.S. service vets -- soldiers, sailors, and airmen. They are pressuring
the veterans who use the VHA health services – at about 500 hospitals
across the U.S.. – to give blood samples. During every routine visit,
and also by phone and mail. The blood samples, once obtained, are then
placed in cryogenic storage in a huge bio-repository on the East Coast.
These blood samples contain the soldiers' own DNA – the code of
their genetic makeup.

To what
end?

That's
the million dollar question about the million veteran program program,
isn't it?

Why
would the U.S. government want a gigantic database of genetic information
about a million American service veterans?

Echoes
of Tuskegee

Remember,
the feds don't have a quite unassailable record when it comes to medical
research. We all know for a fact that American military doctors infected
black Americans with syphilis in the infamous "Tuskegee" experiments
decades ago. This caused neurological damage, dementia, and other maladies
for the unfortunate few who were subject to the sick experiments.

What's
more, the CIA famously used doses of LSD during the Cold War to get the
"truth" out of communist suspects. While it may or may not have
elicited reliable intelligence information, it most certainly created
a new generation of mental patients for America's already crowded psychiatric
wards.

Lastly,
who can forget that many African-Americans allege that the AIDS virus
was created in American laboratories as a biological weapon.

What
needs to happen here, right now, before this madness of the million veteran
program goes any further is a massive Congressional investigation. I'm
calling on the new House GOP Majority to hold hearings with its Veterans
Affairs Committee on this program to get to the bottom of this suspicious
project. VA says the genetic information will be kept confidentially and
will be used to seek out cures in the future for diabetes, heart disease,
post traumatic stress disorder, and even susceptibility to poisoning by
agent orange defoliant. Maybe that's all true.

But
if the VA has the genetic samples of millions of veterans in storage in
a massive, cryogenically frozen state, couldn't they use the data for
other purposes as well?

We know
the Obama administration, as one of its first acts upon taking office
in 2009, was to completely eliminate the Bush administration's restrictions
on experiments with stem cell lines from aborted fetuses. So Obama and
his kindred socialists in the federal government are already willing –
and noww able – to experiment on the populace, or at least the offspring
of the populace.

I wonder
what the members of veterans groups like the American Legion – II
am one – will think when they hear about this strange, new Mengele-like
medical program coming from the agency that is supposed to protect their
health after they gave years of service to the military of these United
States. What about the other veterans service groups, Blue Star Mothers?
Do they want their sons and daughters to be experimented on, or to have
their genes experimented on, in some laboratory by white coated Kupersmith
and O'Leary?

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You
know, it was Kupersmith who, decades ago, authored one of the first papers
in American medicine on what is today called "comparative effectiveness
research." Comparative effectiveness is shorthand for understanding
what treatments are most effective on what populations. In other words,
comparative effectiveness research lays the foundation for what former
GOP Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin called "death panels."
Is theVA using a million veterans as lab rats to determine what therapy
works, and what therapy does not work, on disorders commonly suffered
by veterans, so as to lay the groundwork to create "death panels"
for them, and then, the rest of U.S.?

That's
the question Secretary Eric Shinseki – Obama's appointeee to and
head of the VA – needs to be called before Congress to answer immediately.

Attorney
Eugene J. "Gene" Koprowski is Chairman of the Young Guns Conservative
Fund, a non-profit, 527 political action committee which aims to keep
the pressure from the Tea Party movement on the new freshmen Republicans
elected to the Congress this fall, and to keep them focused on core conservative
principles. The PAC raises money online to run issue ads on the Internet
and on the radio and TV in the Washington D.C. metro market on immigration
reform, repealing Obamacare, and other issues of importance to true grassroots
conservatives. He holds a law degree from the Thomas Jefferson School
of Law, a master's degree from the University of Chicago, and completed
his undergraduate work at Northwestern University. An award-winning journalist,
Mr. Koprowski earned an Emmy Award Nomination in 2008 from the National
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) for his work for FoxNews.com.